Have the Mets Hit Their Low Point?

The stat has been repeated several times, but you really can't say it enough: Since the All-Star Break, the Nationals and the Braves have won more games at Citi Field than the Mets have. That is about as staggering a figure as one can imagine. Mets fans, once the second-half collapse happened, had resigned themselves to not making the playoffs. But what has happened in the second half of this season has been a bottoming out. Except that it could still get worse.

How bad has it gotten? Well, you absolutely have to read Jason Fry at Faith and Fear in Flushing, who has a depressing, all-encompassing, call-to-lack-of-arms post that frames how this might, in fact, be the worst time to be a Mets fan in franchise history. A highlight:

The team is horrible. It’s astonishingly horrible night after night after night. The stat’s being repeated ad nauseum, but it deserves to be: Since the break the Nationals and Braves both have more wins at Citi Field than the Mets do. No one can catch, no one can play the outfield, and no one can hit. The team is an embarrassment off the field too, so craven and corporate that it won’t even stand up to MLB suits in defense of its own admirable homegrown tradition about honoring local heroes by wearing their caps during one game a year. .... The Mets’ ownership escaped a death sentence in the Madoff affair, but they seem to have crawled away from it bleeding out instead of decapitated. At least that’s how I now read the state of affairs — that Howard Megdal has been right all along, even while saying things I didn’t want to believe. Really, the tipoff should have been the team’s typically amateur-hour effort to smear and disenfranchise Megdal: The Mets are never more shrill and self-righteous than when someone has revealed a truth they wanted to keep hidden.

This strikes us as a tad too grim — for all the Mets problems, there are still plenty of other fans around baseball who would love to have some of their problems — but as a portrait of a particularly low moment in Mets history, it's rather devastating. Hopefully Fry will look back at it in a year and realize he was overreacting a little. Or maybe, in a year, he'll look back and think, Wow, I was so optimistic back then.